I'm in the process of building a new vdr box with an Epia mini-itx motherboard and I intend to build it into the case of an old video recorder. The front panel has loads of buttons on it such as play, pause, rew, stop, rec, etc. and it would be really good if I could connect these up. :-) I have bought a USB numeric keypad (meant for laptops) that I found cheap in a sale and I have rewired the buttons on the front panel of the video into a matrix and connected them in place of the numeric keypad (it is basically just a small usb module with a keypad membrane plugged into it). All seems to work: I get a new usb input device when I attach it and if I cat the relevant input device, I can see the keypresses. So far so good. My problem now is how to actually use the thing to control vdr! At the moment, the keyboard driver is grabbing it and all I get is a series of keycodes such as numbers, *, /, -, etc. I am using vdr with a LIRC remote but it also has the keyboard remote compiled in, and, at the moment, pressing random buttons on the front panel does strange things, as would be expected! I can see at least two options: 1. Delete my remote.conf and program the 'keyboard' remote using the front panel (I won't be able to use the proper keyboard to control vdr but I'm sure I can cope with that!). 2. Use the remote plugin with the input device. If I do this, I will still be getting random commands sent to vdr through the keyboard driver, unless I can remove the usb keyboard driver and get the remote plugin to talk to the remote plugin using a raw device, or something. Has anyone managed to do something like this? I know that it is possible to use buttons attached to a gameport in conjunction with the joystick plugin but this motherboard does not have a gameport. Thoughts? Cheers, Laz
